The work of an enterprise (e.g. a business and/or organization) may be divided into formal and informal parts. The formal work is prescribed by business processes. The informal work is to manage these processes. However, personnel (e.g. managers) often find it challenging to manage information about the multitude of issues addressed on a daily basis, and further may find collaborating with colleagues in these matters challenging.
For example, personnel often need to partition their attention across many issues of varying urgency in an organization, and they must often function outside of normal formal business processes and workflows, addressing and resolving issues as they arise, often on piecewise basis. It becomes very challenging to track the various issues being managed. In a specific example, in a single conversation, two members of an organization may discuss/manage several different issues that may or may not be interrelated. Further, the consideration of a strategic issue may have to be deferred to deal with an urgent issue that is (e.g.) stopping production or alienating a customer. In these situations, personnel will not typically have the luxury of planning a schedule so as to be able to carefully prepare for each task. Rather they must be able to dynamically assess a situation and render attention to the most currently important issues, setting priorities among competing requests for higher attention to deal with the most pressing matters. In doing so, personnel will often be shifting attention from one matter to another, and hence members of an organization must be able to become quickly familiar with the new issue. Further, they must be able to refresh their memory about a matter that has been put aside and to become aware of developments that have occurred since it was last taken up.
While Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems do address some of these problems however, they are largely directed to maintaining a relationship with a customer: when a customer calls, an agent is provided with a screen pop yields tombstone (name, address, etc.) data along with a history of the customer's prior interactions with the organization, such as prior purchases or interactions to resolve issues. The agent is further provided with a script based on these prior interactions. While this information assists the agent with handling the call, the agent is generally not being asked to judgement calls in relation to the business context of the customer: in other words, the CRM is assisting largely with formal processes, but not informal processes. Neither does the CRM assist the agent with managing issues within the organization.
Furthermore, personnel may be interacting with various applications in the course of a workday, and may be regularly configuring each application for particular contexts. Using the example of scheduling the next meeting in a context in a scheduling application, for example when a user is currently participating in a meeting associated with a the same context, the user will have to take time to enter the names of all participants in the next meeting, the reason for the next meeting and other information so that the scheduling application can perform its task. This is irritating as all the required data within the context is generally available, but the application must be manually configured with the data. While some applications may allow for customization according to certain context-based data, for example distribution lists in e-mail applications, each individual application must generally be individually customized.